Posted on 05/29/2003 9:23:28 PM PDT by Mr. Mojo
Over the past 30 years, I've been paid to write almost two million words, every one of which, sooner or later, came back to the issue of guns and gun-ownership. Naturally, I've thought about the issue a lot, and it has always determined the way I vote.
People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single- issue thinker, and a single- issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician -- or political philosophy -- is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.
Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.
If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.
If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.
What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?
If he doesn't want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it?
If he makes excuses about obeying a law he's sworn to uphold and defend -- the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights -- do you want to entrust him with anything?
If he ignores you, sneers at you, complains about you, or defames you, if he calls you names only he thinks are evil -- like "Constitutionalist" -- when you insist that he account for himself, hasn't he betrayed his oath, isn't he unfit to hold office, and doesn't he really belong in jail?
Sure, these are all leading questions. They're the questions that led me to the issue of guns and gun ownership as the clearest and most unmistakable demonstration of what any given politician -- or political philosophy -- is really made of.
He may lecture you about the dangerous weirdos out there who shouldn't have a gun -- but what does that have to do with you? Why in the name of John Moses Browning should you be made to suffer for the misdeeds of others? Didn't you lay aside the infantile notion of group punishment when you left public school -- or the military? Isn't it an essentially European notion, anyway -- Prussian, maybe -- and certainly not what America was supposed to be all about?
And if there are dangerous weirdos out there, does it make sense to deprive you of the means of protecting yourself from them? Forget about those other people, those dangerous weirdos, this is about you, and it has been, all along.
Try it yourself: if a politician won't trust you, why should you trust him? If he's a man -- and you're not -- what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If "he" happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she's eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn't want you to have?
On the other hand -- or the other party -- should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?
Makes voting simpler, doesn't it? You don't have to study every issue -- health care, international trade -- all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.
And that's why I'm accused of being a single-issue writer, thinker, and voter.
But it isn't true, is it?
Frankly, I thought the percentage was even higher than that. ...around 99%.
Good stuff IMO. Excellent visualisation of how things COULD BE.
Bump
More effective than beating off an attacker with a fish, and they smell better.
I know many gunowners who pay their yearly NRA dues (if they aren't already lifetime members) but don't do anything else to help support the 2nd Amendment -- no writing of congressman, no signing of petitions, etc. They basically pay their $30 a year to get American Rifleman magazine, an NRA cap, and a sticker. Do you consider those types to be among the 6%?
A horrifying image that conjures up sheep going to the slaughterhouse.
This coming August I'll have been a Life member of the National Rifle Association 22 years. If you're not a member yourself, it may surprise you to learn that, by the standards of that organization, born just after the War between the States, this isn't particularly long. I know people who've been in the NRA twice as long as I have, and one or two who've been members three times that number of years.
It is long enough, however, to make me wonder, as one does upon occasion in any long-term relationship, whether, knowing everything I know today, after 22 years, I'd do it again. Lately, the answer seems to be -- and I'm sure the NRA will be devastated to learn this -- that I'd have to think about it.
Knowing everything I know today, I'd want assurances this time that the NRA is willing and able to perform the task that brought me to it. I'd been in Junior NRA as a Scout, but the course of my life had taken me away from shooting (it seems hard to believe now) until just before that surrealistic year of 1968 when, as a newly-fledged handgun owner (we'd had an incident in the neighborhood) I recall sitting in front of the TV watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, knowing the proclivity of liberals to blame everyone but the perpetrator, and thinking, "Boy, we're gonna get it now."
And so we did.
And so I joined the NRA, although it took me five more years to get the cash together for Life membership. Since then, we've lost one fight after another until today, the enfringements we deal with -- on an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right that was supposed to be absolutely guaranteed -- are beyond anything most members of the NRA 22 years ago would have believed.
I was one of a few who saw the ugly future ahead, even then. Four years after I became a Life member, I wrote my first science fiction novel, full of dire predictions. I also wrote letters, not just to politicans, but to editors of gun magazines, even to the NRA's top banana, the guy who looked so much like Nikita Khrushchev, urging them to stop fighting the Battle of the Second Amendment as a holding action, a tactic we have seen was bound for inevitable defeat, and adopt an offensive strategy.
Those editors (with a remarkable exception whose good judgement I'll repay by NOT associating his name with mine) laughed me off as an alarmist. I never heard from the bald guy at the NRA. And why should I? Who was I? Just some nobody, worried over what was about to happen to his unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights. For that matter, who am I today? Just a 22-year Life member wondering whether he'd do it all over again, remember?
As I say, I'd want assurances this time, sort of a prenuptial agreement, before I slipped the metaphorical ring on my trigger finger. My 22 years of experience have taught me a few things -- a dozen of them, roughly -- about defending the Second Amendment. For the life of me, I don't understand why they haven't taught the same things to the NRA.
FIRST, I'd want the NRA not to write any more legislation. It's said the NRA leadership wrote the Gun Control Act of 1968 (before my time, if you'll recall). I know they wrote the Maryland Handgun Ban because they were afraid that something worse was in the works. Fear seems to be their principal motivation, not anger or determination. Invariably it steers them toward a submissive, repulsive "strategy" of doing the enemy's work before he can do it himself.
SECOND, I'd want the NRA not to trade away any more rights it "thinks" are less important for those it "thinks" are more so. The leadership would find, if they ever asked, that their membership often disagrees with them. The "cop-killer" bullet fiasco comes to mind, where we got trivial reforms in a devil's bargain -- letting them make some bullets illegal -- that serves our enemies so well today that one particularly repellant and evil Senator has based the sunset of his career on it.
THIRD, I'd want the NRA to stop supporting government activities irrelevant, even harmful, to the Second Amendment. Increasingly, gun owners see that the War on Drugs, to name an example, was meant from the outset as a calculated assault on the Bill of Rights, especially on the Second Amendment. It must end if there's to be anything left of the Constitution in the 21st century. That isn't the NRA's job, but it should butt out of the debate. Its "Operation Crimestrike", celebrating patently illegal incursions against individual rights is nothing more than a sustained, humiliating grovel -- like having to watch another kind of civil rights advocacy crawl up on the verandah and whine, "See Massah, what a good boy Ah is?"
FOURTH, in the same context, I'd want the NRA to disconnect all future discussion of the Second Amendment from the totally unrelated topic of crime. My rights have nothing whatever to do with anything anybody else does, right or wrong. If the crime rate were only 1/10 that of today, my rights would be unaffected. Likewise, if the rate were TEN TIMES what it is, it would have nothing whatever to do with my individual right to own and carry weapons.
FIFTH, I'd want the NRA to reject all future argument about the "sporting use" of weapons -- why look like an imbecile, pushing the AK-47 as a deer rifle, when it meets the Founding Fathers' ACTUAL criteria so elegantly? -- in favor of frank and frequent public reference to the original Constitutional purpose for an armed citizenry, which is to intimidate the government.
SIXTH -- and this may be the most important point I'll make, so pay attention -- I'd want the NRA to adopt as its principal and publicly-acknowledged objective the repeal or nullification of every weapons law, at every level of government in America. The Second Amendment is explicit about this and requires no esoteric legal interpretation. Check the dictionary meaning of "enfringe" if you doubt my word.
SEVENTH, in support of that objective, I'd want the NRA to print ads, half a page in every issue, in all its periodicals, reminding members of the duty and power of an American jury to nullify any law it believes unjust or unconstitutional. Alcohol prohibition died this way. Gun prohibition could, as well. All it takes is eight and a third percent of the population, one twelfth, to carry it off.
EIGHTH, I'd want the NRA to establish programs to educate the police in their absolute obligation (given the Nuremburg trials after World War II) to enforce only those statutes -- and obey only those commands -- that are lawful, i.e., constitutional. For many decades, the NRA has spent a lot of resources in what can only be described as sucking up disgustingly to the military and the cops; it's past time we got something out of it. (I'm an ex-reservist, my brother's a deputy, and we both grew up in the Air Force, so don't give me a hard time -- this is the truth, and we all know it.)
NINTH, I'd want the NRA to give up the self-defeating notion that you can keep guns OUT of the hands of the "wrong" folks, while simultaneously and miraculously keeping them IN the hands of the "right" folks. Each of us is somebody else's badguy. In the last century, laws were passed to keep guns from Italians and the Irish. Earlier this century it was blacks and now it's those who believe in the Bill of Rights. Get it straight: the latter could never have happened if the former hadn't been possible. No more background checks, NRA, no more prior restraint. History, ancient and recent, clearly shows that if the badguys have guns, the only way to handle it is to make sure as many goodguys have guns as possible.
TENTH, while we're on the subject of prior restraint, I'd want the NRA to abandon its strategically idiotic enthusiasm for government-controlled concealed carry -- illegal under the Second Amendment -- in favor of uncontrolled and legal "Vermont Carry". If it won't, I guarantee that in years to come, someone will say: the NRA wants your name on this piece of paper BEFORE you'll be allowed to exercise your unalienable individual, Constitutional, civil, and human rights. The NRA wants your age, address, phone, sex, race, social security number, photograph, and fingerprints as a cost of doing what the Framers meant you to do without all that. In short, it wants to impose the very system of gun and owner registration we've been fighting more than 60 years!
Huey Long, virtual dictator of Louisiana in the 1930s when Mussolini was making the trains run on time, was asked by the press, "Will we ever have fascism in America?" "Yes," Long replied with a grin, "but we'll call it ANTIfascism." I can guarantee that someone will say all of this, because if nobody else does, I will. And to the advocates of licensed carry, I say now: don't you realize how pathetic you look, lying there with your OWN foot on your neck?
ELEVENTH, I'd want the NRA to make endorsements based on the candidate's respect for the Second Amendment, regardless of his affiliation or its estimate of his chances. It's suicidal -- if only because it denies us leverage we'd otherwise possess over the Republicans -- to say a third party candidate can't win, and on that self-fulfilling basis, withhold endorsement that could give him, and us, a victory. If "NRA" stands for "National Republican Association" let it be said plainly and stop what amounts to a consumer fraud. If not, then if a candidate's unwilling to be photographed for public consumption firing a machine gun, a semiautomatic rifle with a long, curved magazine, or a pistol with a fat, two-column grip, he can't be trusted whatever his affiliation, and shouldn't be endorsed.
TWELFTH, I'd want the NRA to reduce its Board of Directors to no more than 20, so they can lead instead of turning things over to a tiny, often misguided elite. One director I know told me the NRA is in trouble precisely because its huge, unwieldy board flounders helplessly, leaving policy in the hands of a "troika" with its own agenda. It's time for that to end.
In general, I'd give the NRA the same advice I give everybody else. Never let anybody keep you from enjoying your rights to the fullest, not for a day, not for a minute. Never let anybody stand in your way. Never accept even the most reasonable-sounding excuse for why you can't have everything you deserve. Never accept compromise.
Worse than thieves, murderers, or cannibals, those who offer compromise slow you and sap your vitality while pretending to be your friends. They are not your friends. Compromisers are the enemies of all humanity, the enemies of life itself. Compromisers are the enemies of everything important, sacred, and true.
So, would I join the NRA all over again, after 22 years, knowing everything I know today? I guess I'm still thinking about it.
Give me a reason, NRA.
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